The Umbrella Wars.

23/01/2014 , 3:25 PM by Oshaughnessy Gillian

We've been having a colourful debate here at 720 after I shyly confessed to my colleagues that I'd taken to carting about a fold up brolly to shade me from the sun instead of a hat. Hear me out. (My colleagues didn't. They were laughing too loudly.) I get burnt really easily. It's been 37 degrees in the shade all week. I hate hat hair, and the horrible red line I get round my head if I wear a hat. I lose stuff all the time so even when I wear a hat, I leave it somewhere. Metropolitan Perth is littered with hats I have put down and forgotten to pick up again. And I can't be stuffed carting around a hat anyway. Cue lightbulb moment. I'd use my fold up umbrella made for the rain, as a sun shade. It shades more of me than a hat. And when I'm done, I can fold it up and it fits in my handbag. I thought it was brilliant. My producers, when they stopped hooting, told me it was just weird, and that made me, by definition, a weirdo. I was one step away from wearing a mask in public. Di did say she knew one other person who used an umbrella as sun shade, and they wear pyjama pants in public. So I polled the listeners. There were lots of opinions, many of them strong, some unkind, ranging from, "smart: it's bloody hot" to "crazy as a coconut, mad as a March hare."